I once saw "Harold and Maude" at a revival house. By movie's end, I found myself wishing that someone would steal Ruth Gordon's ambulance - with Ruth Gordon still inside it. Only fair, considering how car theft is casually treated by the title characters as a humorous, life-affirming lark.

Like Tom Robbins or Carlos Castaneda or MASH or your olive green bathtub, most of the effluvia of the '60's and '70's has not aged well at all. I loved Harold and Maude when I saw it in the theater, but when I got the DVD so my wife could see it I was appalled at how crappy and predictable it was. Creating enduring culture hasn't exactly been a Boomer strength. Blind Faith's Can't Find My Way Home is about it.

In a couple of weeks, I will be doing the reverse. Turner Classics is showing "North by Northwest" in selected movie theaters. I have never seen it on the big screen - only on small sets and, more recently, our larger flat screen.

Can't wait to see the iconic scenes like the airplane/corn patch and Mt. Rushmore.

In a couple of weeks, I will be doing the reverse. Turner Classics is showing "North by Northwest" in selected movie theaters. I have never seen it on the big screen - only on small sets and, more recently, our larger flat screen.

Look out for the moment when the kid plugs his ears *before* Eva Marie Saint "shoots" Cary Grant.

I suppose it's been a while since I watched it, myself, but I saw it twenty years after it originally came out and thought it was pretty great.

Some movies get better over time because their influences fade away faster than they do. Harold and Maude has a fairly conventional message for its time -- self actualization through not taking things so seriously -- dressed up in a lot of black humor and an original plot. Nowadays the good stuff is still good, but the hippy stuff is less of a cliche.

Here's the web page for Caro's "Is It Still Funny?" series, listing movies.

"Caddyshack" is one of them:

"It’s summer and thus time for golf, smart-dumb humor and CADDYSHACK. Harold Ramis, making his directorial debut from a script he wrote with Brian Doyle-Murray and Douglas Kenney, said he originally envisioned this as a comedy about teens working at a country club, but soon he realized it actually was about the wisecracking, troublemaking adults — namely Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight and Bill Murray (who improvised the bulk of his lines). Oh, and let’s not forget the gopher puppet. Some folks, including a bunch of reviewers upon its release, consider CADDYSHACK a dud. Others, including those who requested it at previous “Is It Still Funny?” screenings, think it’s one of the funniest comedies ever. (It’s ranked 71st on the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest comedies list.) Which way will you swing?"

There's this, about "Tootsie":

"This had all the makings of a disaster given the revolving door of writers and directors involved in its many years of development. Yet with Dustin Hoffman in a dress and Sydney Pollack behind the camera, TOOTSIE became a comedy classic, garnering 10 Oscar nominations (including a Best Picture nod plus a supporting actress win for Jessica Lange), the No. 2 ranking (after SOME LIKE IT HOT) on the American Film Institute’s all-time top-comedies list and preservation by the National Film Registry. Now that we have 34 more years of gender-role explorations under our belts, how does this tale of an arrogant actor who gets in touch with his female side hold up? Is It Still Funny? The very ‘80s soundtrack may be…"

Another one on the list is "Being There," which Meade and I watched recently.

Here's what I wrote about re-watching "Being There" (in early December).

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Did we watch "Being There" now, because of Trump? Did "Being There" amaze and distress us with its continued relevance because of Trump?

Actually, not at all. Peter Sellers's character — Chance/Chauncey Gardiner — was just about the complete opposite of Donald Trump. Chance was a man who seemed to come out of nowhere and to make statements about gardens that other people perceived as brilliant political metaphor — "the most refreshing and optimistic statements I've heard in a very, very long time." His lack of any known background counted as a plus to the rich insiders who got the idea of advancing him to the presidency: "A man's past cripples him. His background turns into a swamp and invites scrutiny."

That's much closer to the story of Barack Obama than Donald Trump.

Trump has been so well known for so long. He had a huge weight of past baggage, and it didn't cripple him. He had that "swamp" of a background that invited scrutiny, but he made it anyway. He didn't make it because rich insiders chose him to serve their interests. He was the rich insider himself, and the other rich insiders were the opposite of delighted by his communication style. Trump didn't make simple abstract statements that worked because voters projected their own hopes onto him. He blabbed endlessly about all sorts of concrete problems and played upon our fears and our sense of loss at least as much as optimism.

I don't remember whether we found it funny a few months ago, so I really don't know how funny I found it when it came out and I can't do a comparison.

I think I thought both times that it had a lot of very interesting ideas and good acting. I don't know if anything felt all that funny.

Sellers plays a mentally disabled man. I don't easily laugh at a person like that. There is an outtake section after the credits that shows how hard it was for Sellers to act like that. HE keeps laughing. THAT made me laugh.

The first movie I ever saw Ruth Gordon in was Rosemary's Baby, and I found that her performance there has colored my view of every other film she ever made. When I saw Harold and Maude for the first time years later, I couldn't shake the feeling that she secretly wanted to sacrifice Harold to Satan.

She won an Academy Award for Rosemary's Baby. She was seventy- two at the time. In her acceptance speech, she told the crowd how encouraging it was to receive the award. If they ever gave out awards for Oscar acceptance speeches, hers would be on the short list......I saw Harold & Maude. It was ok, but I couldn't understand the buzz around it. Even when I could pass for hip, there was so much about being hip that I couldn't grog.